Place Corps Friday Digest: Multitude

Cohort 2019 with friends and family celebrating the joy of being together at Place Corps.

Gusts of wind are blowing golden leaves around the Schnackenberg farm house and we are bundled in wools with our hands wrapped around lemon ginger tea. We are awaiting the even colder days ahead but for now celebrate the crisp air with glee. If you're lucky, you might catch Luke tossing piles of leaves lost in wonder.

This past week we had the pleasure of welcoming our friends and families to Place Corps' campus and to the Fall Festival at Hawthorne Valley. We beautified campus for the day-long event but realized the day became most beautiful when all our guests were happily immersed in sharing in the Place Corps learning experience. Together we made fermentations, pressed apples, planted garlic, and sat together for a shared farm feast. We are already imagining a spring party!

Also, this week we ventured into Hudson for a workshop on navigation. We examined how we find things when we don't know where they are. We noted how the questions we ask and our own histories inform our directions. We experienced place not as objective but as subjective; and we began thinking about what are the questions we will ask in our own places as we move towards our Place Story Projects over the winter intercession.

Next week we are excited to learn more about the field of Oral History and how it can be a tool for expanding our understanding of place.

Our word for the week is MULTITUDE. Multitude is a term for a group of people who cannot be classed under any other distinct category, except for their shared fact of existence. We all belong in the multitude of complexity, contradictions, and shared histories of life. How lucky are we to be charged with this one precious life?

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

-Walt Whitman

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you.
Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time.”

― Jesmyn Ward